http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
THE FOLKS AT the Educational Testing Service, the group that administers
the Scholastic Aptitude Test to more than 1.2 million college-bound students
each year, have created quite a controversy these last couple of weeks, and
now, they're trying to figure their way out of a mess of their own making.

It all began on Aug. 31, when the Wall Street Journal reported that ETS was
considering a new program to award extra points on the SAT for students who
perform above their expected level, based on a variety of factors, including
family income, parents' education, the quality of the high school they
attended, and race.

The idea was to give extra points to those students ETS dubbed "strivers":
poor and minority students who score 200 points higher than their peers or
between 1000 and 1199 out of a possible 1600. Within 24 hours of the story
breaking, ETS was deflating its own trial balloon, blaming the news media
for "misleading" coverage.

Why this tempest in a teapot? Ever since voters in California passed a
statewide referendum outlawing racial preferences in college admissions in
1996, those who favor affirmative action have been on the defensive. For
years, most colleges and universities -- especially academically competitive
ones -- have admitted minority students whose grades and test scores, on
average, were lower than those of white students.

Since black students, on average, score almost 200 points below whites on
the SAT, college administrators argued that minority enrollment would drop
dramatically if they applied the same criteria to blacks and whites. But
this double standard has come under increasing attack, not just in
California, but also in Washington state, which passed an initiative similar
to California's last year, and in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana, which
must abide by a 5th Circuit court ruling that outlawed racial preferences in
college admissions.

So, what's the solution? Most supporters of affirmative action would like
colleges to place less emphasis on SAT scores -- or drop the test
altogether, which has ETS worried. After all, if schools stopped requiring
the SAT, or its competitor, the ACT (produced by the American College
Testing Program), because blacks and Hispanics perform poorly on it, the
testing people would lose the major portion of their higher-education
business. No wonder ETS hoped to find a way to make their test more
minority-friendly. Actually, this is only the latest in several such
attempts dating back more than 25 years.

Although critics have accused the SAT of being racially biased for years,
ETS has weathered those charges by continuously adapting its test questions
to be more racially and ethnically sensitive. Every service and product ETS
offers undergoes a "fairness review" to ensure that the material meets the
latest standard for political correctness and racial sensitivity.

Most importantly, however, the SAT itself pretty accurately predicts
first-year grades for both whites and blacks, which is what the test is
designed to do. (If anything, the test somewhat over-predicts the grade
performance of black students, who do even less well, on average, than their
lower test scores predict.) But the political pressure remains to find a way
to boost the scores of blacks and Hispanics and close the racial gap with
whites and Asians, which widened this year.

But giving some black and Hispanic test-takers extra points because they
attended bad schools or their parents didn't finish college won't solve the
problem. While some students may indeed perform above their "expected"
level, based on their economic status, these strivers include whites and
Asians as well as blacks and Hispanics. Should poor whites or Asians be
given less credit for exceeding expectations than similarly situated blacks
or Hispanics?

If colleges and universities want to give extra consideration to students
who have overcome social and economic adversity, why not do it on a
color-blind basis? And no matter what extra credit colleges give such
strivers in the admissions process, the schools may find that SAT scores
really do matter when it comes to college grades. There's simply no easy way
to compensate for the missing information a student lacks if he scores 1000
on the test rather than 1200 or
1400.